A cornucopia of clues and one big twist to lead us into the second half of season 3.
Recap
When Shauna returns home from her citizen detective stint with Walter, she belatedly tells Jeff (and Callie, who overhears) about Lottie’s death. This prompts their daughter to rush into her room and finally procure the mysterious cassette tape from the premiere. Even before they figure out how to play it, Shauna decides that this, plus the brakes and the freezer lock-in, means that someone is trying to kill them. And so the Sadeckis pack up for an extended stay at the Jolly Hitcher.
The Wilderness portions seem to span a few months, starting right after Shauna and Melissa hobbled Ben and culminating in Canadian Thanksgiving in mid-October. As weeks go by and nothing changes about the Yellowjackets’ situation—aside from the increasing chill and the knowledge that they’ll have to prep for a second winter in the woods—they cling to the stubborn belief that they have to keep Ben alive, as he represents some sort of bridge home. But his will to live plummets in proportion, and he goes on hunger strike while begging Nat to kill him. She refuses, even as he lets rotting food pile up in his enclosure, which ultimately forces the girls to force-feed him liquids.
Akilah and Lottie descend into the caves on multiple occasions, but her only visions are familiar moments from home (her family, playing as a team) that are set before their plane crash. When she does finally get a new vision, she doesn’t know how to interpret it: She flashes through their village, abandoned, and then a three-eyed bear lumbers in.
In the present, Van is living out one of those two-sentence Reddit horror stories with relation to Tai. First, while searching for the DAT player at Tai’s place, an old cradle phone starts ringing… but it’s unplugged. On the other line is Tai’s voice saying “Van? Um, I can’t… Help!”, only to cut out when Taissa walks into the room. Then, in the middle of the night, Tai shoots up in bed gasping “Van! Van, please, you gotta help me!”—only for what clearly seems like Other Tai to take back over and lull her back to normal mumbling in her sleep.
And what exactly is on that digital audio tape? Shauna, Van, and Tai meet up for an impromptu listening sesh in the car, but only get so far as a female voice saying “testing, 1, 2, 3…” and some adolescent screams and shouts before they shut it off. They seem to recognize what it is (Van: “Everyone who knows about this is in this car, or dead”), even if they don’t know who recorded it. Then Shauna discovers that Callie had snuck her phone into Shauna’s bag and that it’s been recording their conversation, so she bounces without explaining why to the others.
Meanwhile, poor Misty is left out of the bonding moment. She’s been busy though, pissily texting with Walter even as he offers up Lottie’s trash as an olive branch. That leads her to a takeout order from former cult follower Lisa, who was the recipient of Lottie’s $50K and practiced apology, but who is adamant that she didn’t kill her. When Misty gets her morgue lackey Karl to analyze some DNA from beneath Lottie’s fingernails, the genetic results mean nothing to her without a profile to compare it to, so she begrudgingly offers it to her fellow citizen detective to see if he can find anything out.
Shauna confronts Callie about what appear to be several recordings, going beyond mama-bear protectiveness to an actual chilling pronouncement to back off “before I do something I’ll regret.” Callie gets her right back with “I just want to be close to you. I thought you wanted that too.” But then we see that she’s snatched her phone back and swiped over to her recently-deleted folder.
As Ben grows ever weaker, Nat reaches her own inner peace, picks up a knife, and finds him in the middle of the night, but not before Travis reluctantly agrees to be her lookout. Though she initially presses it to Ben’s throat, he guides it to his heart instead and whispers, “Thank you” before she kills him.
The girls turn on Natalie and look about ready to tear her to shreds when Lottie pipes up that Shauna should be leader, correctly guessing that that will appease her bloodlust in the moment. Shauna immediately softens toward the group, reminding them that they’re a team—only to turn that cruelty back onto Nat by sentencing her to preparing Ben’s body for a feast in his honor.
That night, the Yellowjackets don their festive garb for something more approaching the tone of the summer solstice party, except with the cognitive dissonance of them nonchalantly eating Ben’s flesh alongside their nuts and berries. No one disassociates into Greek revelry, nor are they in any altered state.
Well, until Lottie begins mumbling about how “this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen” and starts scream-singing at the Wilderness, which responds. All of the girls eventually join in, until they notice a figure at the edge of their camp. Is it a hallucination of Ben? No, it’s a man—a stranger, perhaps a hiker, and a potential way home. Until, that is, he notices Ben’s head on a stick and immediately recoils, shouting, “What the fuck?!”
Commentary
What the fuck, indeed! It’s downright thrilling to see fresh blood enter the Wilderness, after so long of the Yellowjackets feeling as if they were intruding on someone else’s existence here. I think the fact that they cast familiar face Nelson Franklin (Veep, New Girl) contributed to how jarring the moment is: the breaching of their sphere by a stranger, immediately countered by his response to seeing Ben’s head.
Ben. This poor man who suffered such dehumanization at the hands of these girls; first that mockery of a trial, then incapacitated, and then left in the pen like an animal instead of offered any shelter or other humane treatment. No matter how accurate Akilah’s vision may have been, they’re treating him more as a means to an end than as a person.
For a show with so much death, Nat’s mercy killing still stood out from the other deaths. Or, let me put that better—the Wilderness deaths have each had an impact, while the present ones cheapen the loss of lives with the growing body count. Perhaps because the present ones seem to be someone(s) picking off the Yellowjackets, while the flashback deaths each represent different degrees of desperation.
But it’s also that turning point we’ve been expecting for some time now: the moment in which the Yellowjackets kill and consume not for survival, but for reasons around which they’re building their Wilderness culture: sport, at some point in the near-future with Pit Girl; and for the moment, honoring Ben. Though since that suggestion comes from Shauna, I’m inclined to consider it a bit disingenuous.
Lottie nominating Shauna as queen seems to be the clear point in which the Yellowjackets recognize that they are entering a new phase, from a benevolent and clear-eyed leader (Nat) to a sociopath (Shauna). The way in which her entire demeanor changed when she got what she wanted? Chilling.
Yet she has some begrudging sympathy for Nat when she offers up the tip that she blindfolds herself while butchering the bodies, in this case covering Ben’s face. Of course, that is immediately reversed by them placing his head on a stump for any interlopers to see.
The prevailing theory is that the hikers are birders, and that the DAT is their recording that accidentally picked up at least some of the conversation we’re going to witness at the start of next week’s episode. Or it might not be much of a conversation, because let’s be honest: They’re not making it out of the Wilderness alive. There’s still another winter (several months) between now and the Yellowjackets’ rescue, and these strangers have just witnessed a bunch of teenage girls shrieking around a fire eating the man they killed.
It seems a foregone conclusion in the way that there was the implication (over the past few episodes) that Ben might die, but here’s hoping that the flashbacks surprise us in a way that goes beyond the damning evidence of the DAT.
Fingers and Ears
- This episode was co-written by married writing team Emily St. James and Libby Hill, co-creators of the true crime parody podcast Arden, and they killed it.
- Lots of great lines in this episode: “Do you think Mel has to wear Jackie’s clothes when they make out?” (SAVAGE) “Plus, Jeff’s already in his sleep boxers.” “Not all of us turn our trauma into stabby-stabby.” (That delivery felt rather Buffy.) “I took an oath… and vacation days at work.”
- Not to mention that excellent detail of Shauna demurring about calling Van directly, as they’ve never been that kind of friends.
- What’s with the girls donning masks and Travis in the animal-hide butcher apron for force-feeding Ben? One thought was that they drew cards for the responsibility and felt the need to ritualize this, too. That, or they were expecting him to spit it back into their faces.
- Misty kissing Ben was so creepy and fitting for her character, and also felt in line with a ‘90s teenage girl saying goodbye to her crush, yet still violating.
- One comment I liked from the Yellowjackets subreddit suggests that the “screams” of the Wilderness might be barn owls, which (a) would be laughable in retrospect for how the girls twist it into something more primal and sinister, and (b) would certainly explain the presence of birders.
- Hooray for the return of Repo Divorcées!
I peeked at next week’s promo (how could I not), but thankfully they’re not revealing too much. We just gotta place our own bets on who makes it out of the Wilderness alive!
